10. Charlotte #2
There was a short silence while everyone did the maths.
"She's right," the PR director said, slightly annoyed about it.
Serena's eyes came to Charlotte's and held for a moment, and there was nothing in her face that anyone else in the room could've quoted, and Charlotte received it anyway, complete, like the coffee that morning.
"Do both," Serena said. "Check the list quietly. Offer the exclusive loudly. Nothing under my name today." And then, as the room gathered itself: "Charlotte stays on the distribution for this."
It was eleven words and it redrew her job, and nobody in the room so much as blinked, which told Charlotte the redrawing had been visible to everyone but her for some time.
The room emptied on its assignments. Charlotte was last out, gathering her notebook, and at the door she glanced back, like checking a stove you know perfectly well you turned off.
Serena was already at the window with her phone to her ear, the city arranged below her, her back straight and her free hand resting flat on the glass, and she didn't look as though she'd won anything.
She looked as she'd looked at the situation board in Malibu, counting her people, checking the line.
Charlotte closed the door softly and went to find the editor's number for the PR director, and by four o'clock the trade title had its exclusive and the gossip story had begun its quiet slide to the bottom of the page, where stories go when better-fed ones arrive.
Lou was waiting in the corridor outside the lift at six, holding two coffees, one of which was an ambush.
"So," Lou said, falling into step. "Fun day in PR. We got to watch the twenty-second floor catch fire and then watch it get put out by, and I'm quoting the director directly, the EA, apparently."
"I'm not an EA anymore."
"You sat in a board-level crisis call."
Charlotte accepted the coffee, which committed her to the conversation, which had been the point of the coffee.
"I brought the tablet in. Staying was inertia."
"You restructured the press response and outed an internal leak before lunch." Lou hit the lift button with an elbow, hands being full of coffee diplomacy. "Inertia."
The lift arrived. They rode down through three floors of silence that Lou spent conducting a visible internal debate and lost.
"The look, by the way," she said, "is significantly worse. I want that on the record. Tokyo was the look. This is the look's bigger sister who went to law school."
"Lou."
"I know," Lou said, and her voice came off the banter entirely, which happened twice a year.
"I know, okay. I'm not asking." She pushed the second coffee into Charlotte's hand at the lobby doors, and squeezed her arm once, hard, the full four years of friendship in the grip. "Text me when you get home."
She walked off towards the car park before Charlotte could assemble a reply, which was, from Lou, mercy.
Charlotte called Emily at nine that evening.
She'd had the number since the original introduction, and the thread between them was warm and sparse: a congratulations in week one, a thinking of you when the Tokyo trip was announced, Emily's occasional dispatches about a fox that was disputing her garden.
Charlotte had never rung it. Ringing it meant something, and she stood at her kitchen window for a good five minutes with the phone in her hand before she did it, looking down at the ordinary lit street, rehearsing openings that all sounded insane.
Emily answered on the third ring.
"Charlotte. How lovely."
"I'm sorry to call so late."
"It's nine o'clock and I'm seventy-four, not asleep. I was reading a tremendously bad thriller." A page turned, somewhere in Pasadena. "What can I do for you, my dear?"
Charlotte watched a man across the road attempt to parallel park, fail, and commit to the failure.
"I need to ask you something," she said, "and I don't quite know how to ask it."
There was a small pause on the line, and in the pause Charlotte could hear the thriller being set down, spine up, on a side table, and the listening changed, became total, and she understood that Emily had known what this call was from the second the phone showed her name.
"Then I'll answer it for you straight away," Emily said, gently, "and save you the engineering. Yes, she does. And no, she won't say so. And yes, it's worth waiting for."
The street below went on with its evening. The failed parker pulled out and drove away to live differently.
"I hadn't finished asking," Charlotte managed.
Her own reflection hung faint in the kitchen window, phone to ear, holding very still, a woman receiving a verdict she had wanted and was now required to live with.
"I know," Emily said, and there was a smile in it, and underneath the smile something older and entirely serious.
Emily had been keeping the approaches to Serena Sharpe's heart for twenty years, and had decided, on the strength of whatever she was hearing now, to make a disclosure.
"You weren't going to finish asking, sweetheart.
You were going to ask me something safe about her press coverage and hope I'd volunteer the rest. I've saved us both forty minutes. "
"The press coverage is wrong, for what it's worth."
Down in the street, a dog walker passed under the lamp with three small agendas on leads.
"Of course it's wrong. It's coverage." A blanket rearranged itself; the fox, presumably, patrolled the dark garden unobserved.
"She told you about the first night. I assume you understand what that means.
She has never told that story, Charlotte.
Not to Peter. Not entirely to me, and I was holding the other end of the loan. "
"I know what it means," Charlotte said quietly. "That's rather the problem. I work for her, Emily."
"Mm," Emily said, in the tone of someone declining to find a fact decisive.
"You'll forgive an old woman for observing that the two of you keep telling each other the org chart like it's a safe-conduct.
Give it time. That's all the advice I have, and it's good advice, and neither of you will enjoy it.
Give it time, and don't pretend yourself smaller in the meantime, because she won't fall for it and you'll resent the effort. "
Charlotte stood with her forehead almost against the cool window glass, eyes closed, and let the kindness do its work.
"Thank you."
"Goodnight, my dear. Eat something; you call like a woman who skipped dinner." The thriller was retrieved; the line warmed with the sound of her settling. "And Charlotte. When it happens, be patient with her. She's been the building so long she forgets she's also the guest."
Emily rang off on that, deliberately, before it could be diminished by anything further, and Charlotte stood in her kitchen for a while, phone in hand, with the sentence taking up residence.
That was all she said, and it was exactly enough.